Good bots obey robots.txt directive but bad bots don’t.

Bad bots can create fake user accounts.

Send spam emails.

Harvest email addresses.

They visit as disguise so it is difficult and they are not able to detect easily and escapes security measures.

Disadvantages of Bad bots.

Types of Bad Bots

• Spam Bots• Botnet• Really Bad Bots• Smart Spam Bots

SPAM BOTSWhen a bad bot is used for spamming purpose, then it is known as the spam bot.

It can be crawled and indexed by Google, then Google treat the referrer value in your server log as a backlink thus influencing the search engine ranking of the website being promoted by spammers.

This is what spammers may be thinking when they decide to use spam bots for SEO

However the ranking doesn’t last longer because of smart AI of Google.

Botnet If the spambot is using a botnet then it can

access your website via hundreds of different IP addresses thus making IP blacklisting or rate limiting (rate of traffic sent or received).

Size matters and if bigger is the size of spambot and then more numbers and different IP address traffic will come.

In such cases traffic wont appear as referral but as direct traffic.

In the following will show how botnet looks like in your GA report.

Working of botnet.

So as from the previous figure we can see a site called www.event-tracking.com.

Thus as we can see this is getting traffic from the various locations.

This how botnet works because it might be possible that pc’s in these locations might be affected by botnet and using this botnet gives us a huge amount of traffic on the site.

Due to this it affects our analytical approach and we are misguided due this data.

O There are many website like this-sanjosestartups.com.

O This site is linked to aliexpress.com. The website sanjosestartups.com earns as due to affiliate and thus aliexpress.com gets backlinks.

O Visiting such site can be harmful until and unless you antivirus softwares.

O So don’t visit any suspicious site which is in your GA report unless you have protection.

Really bad spam bots The main objective of this is to infect

your computer with the malware and thus due to this when your pc is affected botnet will use this and give u the traffic on your site from this pc from a certain location.

So blocking such bots will decrease the traffic on the site.

The main aim of this bot is crawl on your

website and scrap down your property id and this id can be shared with various other spam bots.

The google analytics code contains the ID and can be scraped down by smart bots.

Google tag manager can be used for this issue.

Smart Spam Bots